Friday, August 26, 2016

The celebration among my film-oriented friends and acquaintances and blogging colleagues of Alfred Hitchcock's 117th birthday anniversary (eleven come seven!) on and around 13 August reminded me, as any mention of Hitchcock is likely to, of just how profound the influence of the anthology series he licensed his name to (with Random House, under the ghost editorship of Robert Arthur, who sometimes would use his pseudonym "Pauline C. Smith" for the purpose), the Alfred Hitchcock Presents: books, a multimedium tie-in to the television series launched the same year, 1956 (which also saw his partnership with a magazine publisher, to form HSD Publications produce the first issues of the still-publishing Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Random House would shortly thereafter begin publishing Arthur's similar, though rather handsomely illustrated, young readers' anthologies, and eventually to begin a series of teen detective series novels, the Three Investigators, who initially would interact with Hitchcock as a character in the books. Add to that that Dell Books would publish the fat AHP: hardcovers in two-volume paperback sets, and also the more or less annual best-ofs from the magazine, and a level of intentional and unintentional confusion about who was responsible for what under the Hitchcock brand remains a tangle for bibliographers, as has been addressed occasionally on this blog and related ones and centrally on a few such as Frank Babics's and The Hitchcock Zone. So, here's the Contento index of this volume; imagine the effect on a young reader such as myself at age 10 or 11, upon opening such a magisterial selection, not the first AHP: I read, nor certainly the last, but one of the best of a brilliant set...drawn from sources as eclectic as the nature of the stories, save that they featured characters drawn into or trapped by extraordinary circumstances of one outre sort or another, usually told in excellent or at least engaging prose, and usually both intense and shot through with often grim wit:

--the impressive mix of a few Not Yet Quite chestnuts of anthologies of suspense and horror fiction, and related fields, with stories new and older from writers famous or then as now somewhat little known (and keeping it in the family, Arthur includes not only his own fine story--and would in other volumes have both an Arthur and a Pauline C. Smith story on occasion--but also a good one by his wife, Joan Vatsek). Robert Arthur knew his fields of fiction well and had excellent taste...as did his successor Harold Q. Masur, after Arthur's rather early death in 1969; Masur would continue to produce only slightly less diverse anthologies for Random House till Hitchcock's death in 1980, and then one more volume for the same instant remainder publisher, Galahad, that was then publishing at least one of the AHMM-derived anthologies. And, as several of the Arthur Random House volumes could boast, the inclusion as the last entry a complete novel, its first time in a hardcover edition (as apparently no book club was interested in reprinting a paperback original novel about a rather pragmatic fellow who believes quite sincerely he's a vampire...and among other things finds a very convenient manner of sating his craving for blood)(hey, as a kid, I was already aware of the rudiments of menstruation...largely from reading Louise Fitzhugh's second novel about Harriet the Spy, The Long Secret, and from the light pass-over of the matter in some sex-ed materials I'd read, but this was still a bit icky...and that much more so apparently to many theoretically adult readers and editors). Perhaps it wasn't just space limits nor copyright matters/conflict with the Ballantine paperback edition that led to the novel being dropped from the Dell paperback reprint editions...which add the Joseph Payne Brennan story "Slime" and the already rather familiar Robert Hichens "How Love Came to Professor Guildea" (which Arthur would also include in his 1965 YA anthology Alfred Hitchcock's Monster Museum) to help fill the hole.

1970s edition...

I certainly remember the horror stories in this anthology the most clearly among the contents, though the Fitzgerald, as crime fiction, is also very much of a piece with his most famous work in dealing with both the resentment and the envy of the wealthiest Americans, and the enchantment of the protagonist with a young woman not too interested in commitment...another companion piece to Gatsby. The Matheson (borderline suspense/horror about a nice New England town with some odd nutritional tics of its own), the Brennan (one of the most famous of the inspirations for The Blob, and the author's most famous story), the Rice, the Jackson, the Hichens, the Collier, the proto-steampunkish sfnal horror of the Davidson (this might've been the first Avram Davidson story I read) and particularly the "Seabright"--the most famous story by Margaret St. Clair, though her "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes" was dramatized rather well by Night Gallery...I had read the "Gnoles" story in a Betty M. Owen Scholastic Book Services anthology before encountering it here, but it remains great fun. The Masur volumes were even more studded with major crime fiction writers I would encounter again in my adult reading, though often their bylines hadn't stuck with me, and I discovered I'd read them years or decades before in looking again at the anthologies recently, where as one can see above, Arthur was no slouch in this manner, either...Henry Slesar's "Lost Dog" has stuck with me. And I do remember not being able to find "arbutus" in the first dictionary I consulted. And this was definitely the first encounter I had with the fiction of Stuart Cloete...though I wouldn't learn that his surname was "clew-tee" for a decade or so.

I'd say this anthology series, more than any other single set of books, exposed me to what I might enjoy in future reading and sent me down interesting new pathways...often, any anthology or certainly any anthology series I enjoy is at some level compared with range and grace of these books, which apparently did very well indeed for their publishers for more than a quarter century, and are so sorely missed by some that McSweeney's even reprinted one, in a typically half-assed though cute package, in tandem with a similar anthology edited by contributor Ray Bradbury back in the day.

I never quite lost interest, but the ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S ANTHOLOGY issues published in the 1980s reflected the blander nature of the magazine as edited by Cathleen Jordan (not awful, and featuring a scrap more horror fiction than Eleanor Sullivan had before her, but blander)(sadly notable, how Davis Publications editors Sullivan and Jordan both died rather young, in their early '60s...crime fiction doesn't Usually do that to one).

Awesome post Todd (and thanks for the nice shout out) - I had no idea the Sturgeon book had been published in one of the Hitchcock anthologies. One would imagine that more readers would have found it this way than in the original paperback, do you think?

Considering how well most paperbacks were still selling in the early '60s in the US, no, unless there was some distributor resistance to that title or Ballantine. But given how many AHP: books were in libraries, it might have eventually come close (in those bad old days that paperbacks weren't so welcome in libraries and paperbacks rack life in non-booskstores could be as little as a few days or a week...

Check ISFDB's record of editions for the Sturgeon novel here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?14529

Todd, do you have any idea what story by Robert Arthur was used as the source for the Hitchcock hour "The Cadaver"? I've searched everywhere but have not found it yet. I am sure the story was not called "The Cadaver" and I know it wasn't in AHMM.

Other than to guess *maybe* "The Jokester" as by Anthony Morton (The Mysterious Traveler Magazine Mar 1952; The Saint Detective Magazine (UK) Jan 1956) or "Welcome Home"(Dime Mystery Magazine Oct 1948, as “Calling All Corpses!” by Robert Jay Arthur; The Mysterious Traveler Magazine Jun 1952). not even a vague suspicion. I will ask around.